Surgery generally relies on individual skills of surgeons. Dexterity typically is limited to a surgeon's hands and rigid instruments. These limitations are particularly apparent in minimally invasive surgery or natural orifice surgery, in which space to operate is confined by entry point and by anatomy. In minimally invasive surgery, visual feedback is usually provided by an endoscope.
Surgical robots and/or steerable devices may be used in minimally invasive surgery to improve the surgeon's dexterity inside the patient at a surgical site. Examples of surgical robots include multi-arm systems, such as da Vinci® robots, or flexible robots, such as Medrobotics Flex® robotic systems. These robotic systems are controlled by the surgeon (or user) using different interface mechanisms, including hand controllers or input handles for the operating robotic systems, and image displays for capturing endoscope video and displaying various control modes of the robotic systems.
Control of hand-held dexterous devices is challenging. The user has to combine the motion of non-dexterous proximal end which is usually around a fulcrum point (entry point to the body) and complex dexterous motion inside the body. An approach to this problem is robotic positioning of the dexterous device which increases footprint in the operating room and increases cost and duration of surgery. This problem is amplified if the proximal end is not within field-of-view of imaging devices (e.g. an endoscope takes images only on the inside of the patient, and the field of view in a portable imaging system, such as a C-arm, is too small to take image of the entire device and can cause radiation exposure to the operator). In addition, once the position is achieved with the dexterous device, hand tremors and involuntary motion of the hand can cause mis-alignment. In order to improve the surgeon's dexterity, surgical robots may have more than six degrees of freedom, making them unintuitive and otherwise difficult to control.
This issue is amplified by operation in constrained spaces, such as those encountered during minimally invasive surgery or natural orifice surgery and by use of hyper-redundant robots, such as snake robots. Control of these robots is usually performed using handles that are complex to operate and are usually associated with steep learning curve. Users are using endoscope images to navigate the surgical field and it is difficult to map the motion of the handle with the images.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an apparatus, systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for control of a surgical robot using a combination of live imagery and tracking information provided from a virtual reality device enabling target selection using motion detection, while not depending on use of the user's hands or dexterity, generally.